Overview

An exploration of life through a transdisciplinary lens. LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry explores life through the lenses of relationships among communication, nature, and society. The contributors, who come from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, investigate everyday life and expand upon an integrative account of media as environments and technologies. By including collaborations from internationally known scholars from the physical sciences, life sciences, cognitive sciences, and the arts, LIFE addresses issues from a transdisciplinary perspective, emphasizing how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems.  

Full Product Details

Author:   Jeremy Swartz ,  Janet Wasko
Publisher:   Intellect
Imprint:   Intellect Books
Edition:   New edition
ISBN:  

9781789387926

ISBN 10:   1789387922
Pages:   486
Publication Date:   16 February 2024
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
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Table of Contents

Preface to a Trilogy Introduction Genealogy ‘Life, Nature and Systems’, Fritjof Capra ‘What is Life?’, Mark A. Bedau ‘Why Life Cannot Be Defined’, Carol E. Cleland Information and Ecologies ‘Propagating Organization: An Enquiry’, Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and Ilya Shmulevich ‘Friends, Neighbours and Enemies: An Overview of the Communal and Social Biology of Plants’, Roza D. Bilas, Amanda Bretman and Tom Bennett ‘The Conceptual Ecology of the Human Microbiome’, Nicolae Morar and Brendan J. M. Bohannan Enactions and Values ‘From Life to Mind’, Mark L. Johnson ‘Metabolism and Drift’, Thomas Nail ‘From ALife to No Life: On Mediatic Contexts of Life and Death’, Jussi Parikka Ecomediations and Education ‘Media and Information Literacies for a Living World: Engaging with a Cyberist Era’, Divina Frau-Meigs ‘Journalistic Learning and Intentional Teaching with Technologies: STEM and Rural Communities’, Ed Madison ‘Dirtying Ecocinema Studies’, Salma Monani and Stephen Rust Syntheses and Biodesigning ‘System Dynamics, Machine Learning and Structural Validation’, William Schoenberg and Jeremy Swartz ‘Life from the Edge of Synthetic Biology’, Pier Luigi Luisi ‘Templating Life: DNA as Nature’s Hard Drive, Version 2.0’, Mél Hogan and Tessa J. Brown Artful Lives and Metaliving ‘Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Being’, Brook Muller ‘Satoyama and the Art of Rural Regeneration’, Diane Durston ‘Metaliving’, Jeremy Swartz Appendix: Exhibition • Experience • Nature Notes on Contributors Index

Reviews

‘Tolle Lege — though rarely apropos, this stunning book meets the criteria. Destined to be a classic, it revolutionizes communication studies. The impressibility of life systems is imagined globally through sophisticated research. Instead of marginalia and augmented scholasticism, these profound essays teach us innovation and gravitas’. -- Clifford G. Christians, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ‘Undertaking an ambitious intellectual journey, this volume traverses realms of material cultures and lifeworlds, ecologies and symbolic systems, ethics and being. It delves into our deeply mediated world that is nonetheless embedded in nature and embodied in life forms large and small, while addressing some of the most meaningful and existential questions facing humanity, the planet and beyond’. -- Jack Linchuan Qiu, National University of Singapore ‘The editors ask us to zoom both in and out to see how we consider life itself, with eye-opening implications for understanding communication and its possibilities. As biofabrication and artificial intelligence become entwined with human existence, the questions are urgent, timely and fascinating’. -- Lana F. Rakow, University of North Dakota ‘Extending perspectives from media and communication research into life sciences, this second collection in the transdisciplinary series both widens and deepens the reader’s understanding of information as, at once, a material and a symbolic phenomenon’. -- Klaus Bruhn Jensen, University of Copenhagen ‘In the early 21st century, a philosophy of openness marks, embraces and encourages exploration, collaboration and synthesis across traditional boundaries. This journey encourages us to rethink our relationship with the natural world and challenges us to see life as an intricate dance of interactions, transactions and contexts’. -- Changfeng Chen, Tsinghua University

Author Information

Jeremy Swartz is the founder of Metamedia @ UofO, curator and co-director of the What is...? series, courtesy research associate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon, and adjunct assistant professor in Communication at Southern Oregon University. He is co-editor of MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry (Intellect/University of Chicago Press 2021) with Janet Wasko.   Janet Wasko is a professor in Media Studies and Knight Chair in Communication Research Emeritus at the University of Oregon. She is the author or editor of 23 books including MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry (Intellect/University of Chicago Press 2021) with Jeremy Swartz, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, 2nd ed. (Polity 2020).

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